Sample American English
Translation of Unicode Names List

Summary

This technical note provides an example of how the Unicode character
names list [Names] for Unicode, Version 4.1.0,
may be translated into other languages. This translation is an American
English translation.

Status

This document is a Unicode Technical Note. It is supplied purely
for informational purposes and publication does not imply any endorsement by
the Unicode Consortium. For general information on Unicode Technical Notes,
see http://www.unicode.org/notes/.

This technical note provides an example of how the Unicode character
names list [Names] for Unicode, Version 4.1.0, may be translated into
other languages. This translation is an American English translation.

The translated names list in the accompanying data files is provided
only for informational purposes, and is not part of the Unicode
Standard. The author has no intention of updating or maintaining
translation to match future versions of the Unicode Standard,
so people who use the file use it at their own risk.

The idea is to demonstrate, through example, how translation of
the names list can work, to provide an informative list of information
about Unicode characters, without having to match exactly the
sometimes confusing normative Unicode character names in the
standard. Such translations can be used beneficially, for example,
in discussions about characters, or in a user interface,
where the concern might be more about making sure that the
person using the name is clear about the identity of the
character at they know it, rather than needing to exactly match
the normative character name in the standard.

The American English "translation" systematically converts
Anglicisms such as FULL STOP and SOLIDUS to more recognizable
American English terms PERIOD and SLASH, for example. It also
changes such character standard oddities as CARON into the
more recognizable term HACEK. Various corrections for known
misspellings or other errors in the normative names are
also applied, in the interest of providing American English
terms that make as much sense as possible. Of course, many
Unicode character names are for highly technical symbols:

U+22C9 LEFT NORMAL FACTOR SEMIDIRECT PRODUCT

or for characters in scripts that English speakers are typically
not familiar with and using terms from other languages:

U+1939 LIMBU SIGN KEMPHRENG

No attempt is made to provide explanatory rewordings of
such characters or to translate such script-specific language
usage in character names into some analogous phrase in English, as it is
unlikely that such rewordings or translations would actually
help in identification of the characters.

Instead, the translation simply culls away irrelevant
distractions for American English speakers that result from
Anglicisms, standardese, and miscellaneous naming mistakes.

The text file uses the same format and syntax
conventions as [Names]. See [Format]. This
means that, if desired, the translated names list can be manipulated
with the same unibook
utility program that can be used to view the untranslated names
list.

Note that this text file is a plain text file, but for technical
reasons is encoded in ISO/IEC 8859-1, Latin-1, rather than in UTF-8.